The history of the Russian future

The Soviet system created in 1917 finally collapsed a decade ago with Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation, and was replaced by the Russian Federation. But we still do not understand what the Soviet system was like. What was the relationship between Stalinism and Tsarism? How did conservatism and bureaucracy defeat the need for reform? Russia now is divided between nostalgia and rejection of its past.

We need to correct two mistakes in contemporary thought about the Soviet Union: the confusion of anti-communism with real analysis of the USSR and the belief that the entire history of the Soviet Union was Stalinism, or one long gulag.

Anti-communism is an ideology that pretends to be scientific. Under cover of a commitment to democracy, it ignores reality and promotes conservatism by exploiting the dictatorial nature of a hostile regime. German intellectuals who emphasised Stalin’s atrocities to whitewash Hitler did this. McCarthyism in the United States was based on the fear of communism. The West, in defending human rights, has been indulgent to some and castigated others, but has contributed little to a proper understanding of the Soviet system.

We cannot easily classify the Soviet system because — except during the civil war period, when it was little more than a military camp — there were several different Soviet systems. Russian history is a laboratory in which we can study the development of different authoritarian systems — and their crises — down to the present day. Socialism has been understood as a deepening, rather than a rejection, of political democracy. Its tenets are socialisation of the economy and democratisation of the political regime. But in the USSR, there was only statification of the economy and bureaucratisation of politics. We cannot describe the Soviet system after the death of Stalin in 1953 as socialism, since a prerequisite of socialism is that economic assets are owned by society as a whole, not by a bureaucracy.

The Soviet system has been discussed for too long in the wrong, “socialist” terms: the confusion arose because the USSR was not a capitalist economy — its economic assets were owned by the state and entrusted to top-level bureaucrats. So the Soviet system belongs in the same category as traditional regimes where the ownership of vast estates conferred power over the state. The pre-Soviet-Revolutionary Muscovy (...)

* Professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. Author of The making of the Soviet system: essays in the social history of interwar Russia, Methuen, London, 1985, and The Gorbachev phenomenon: a historical interpretation, Radius, London, 1988